The Relationships Made After Route 91

In 2017, journalist Mark Gray was on assignment for Rolling Stone to cover the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas, his hometown. The country music festival, held on the Las Vegas Strip since 2014, had a particularly strong lineup in its fourth year — Eric Church, Sam Hunt, Jason Aldean — and Gray was enlisted to capture the musical high points and overall vibe.

But the third and final night of the festival, Oct. 1, 2017, would tragically become the scene of the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. A gunman opened fire from his hotel room in the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino across Las Vegas Boulevard, killing 58 people and wounding hundreds, all in the span of 11 minutes. Gray went from concert reviewer to crime scene witness, and documented his account in a story for Rolling Stone the next morning. He also went on to co-author a 2022 Rolling Stone deep dive into the shooting and the often confounding search for motive.

Yet Gray’s most expansive writing about Route 91 arrived last year with his new book, The Las Vegas Massacre Connections: Finding Strength Through Tragedy After America’s Deadliest Mass Shooting. In this week’s episode of Rolling Stone’s Nashville Now podcast, we talk to Gray about his experiences that night in Las Vegas and how the bonds he forged with fellow Route 91 attendees, including Mary Jo von Tillow, whose husband Kurt was one of the first shot and killed in the incident, have shaped and steered his life since.

Watch the full episode on Rolling Stone‘s YouTube channel below.

Download and subscribe to Rolling Stone’s weekly country-music podcast, Nashville Now, hosted by senior music editor Joseph Hudak, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts). New episodes drop every Wednesday and feature interviews with artists and personalities like Lainey Wilson, Hardy, Charley Crockett, Kings of Leon, Breland, Bryan Andrews, Gavin Adcock, Amanda Shires, Shooter Jennings, Margo Price, Ink, Halestorm, Dusty Slay, Lukas Nelson, Ashley Monroe, Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor, Clever, and journalists Marissa R. Moss and Josh Crutchmer.

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